A man to watch

Louis Trager, OF THE EXAMINER STAFF

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, March 2, 1995

Nicholas Graham, founder and chief executive of Joe Boxer, wants to fly across Times Square - in a glow-in-the-dark suit and a jet pack, no less - for the publicity launch May 9 of his new international watch line backed by giant Timex.

Another day, another dollar for San Francisco's favorite underwear salesman.

Joe Boxer has expanded from cheeky men's underwear and sleepwear into licensing agreements for funny bedding and linens, women's lingerie, a forthcoming book about underwear and now fashion watches.

For now, the company plans to extend its product lines into other home goods in the near term, but eventually, who knows? Graham says he could end up doing motorcycles or aircraft.

"Anything that (can be) redesigned better or designed humorously can be a Joe Boxer product," Graham declares.

In just nine years, Graham has positioned his company to become the David Letterman of consumer-product design - growing bigger than life by successfully straddling the chasm between the terminally hip and the mass market.

"The thing that makes it special is that everything is infused with a point of view that is about humor and inclusiveness and good-naturedness and entertainment," says company spokeswoman Denise Slattery.

It's a marketing coup on the order of capturing as customers both the oafish, ham-faced characters who served as the butts of old John Waters films, as well as the movies' fans.

That's a tribute to designer and former rock-music wannabe Graham, who has as strong a sense of the bottom line as he does of aesthetics.

It's not every whimsical entrepreneur who can laugh all the way to the bank with the proceeds from more than 6 million pairs of boxer shorts a year. Graham, 37, is majority owner of the privately held South of Market firm, which doesn't air its financial laundry publicly.

"He has a unique skill in that he can let his mind go to these very creative corners and at the same time not lose sight of what it will cost and how to get it to market," Slattery says.

And especially how to promote it, in a way that comes off more Pee-wee Herman show than Ron Popeil infomercial.

Last fall, he collaborated with Dayton's department store for a live satellite comedy show-infomercial from San Francisco, along with a simultaneous underwear chat over America Online.

That was a follow-up to a live radio broadcast from the window of Dayton's in Minneapolis, with 100 boxer dogs and the University of Minnesota marching band sauntering past - all decked out in boxer shorts.

A home page on the Internet's World Wide Web that will

"confuse and entertain at the same time" is coming shortly, Slattery says, from the company that solicited consumer e-mail when most of the corporate world had never heard of it.

Graham promises a national promotion with Virgin Atlantic "unprecedented in the history of airlines."

In addition to all its other assets, the company also seems to have had some luck. In an era when any off-center expression is vulnerable to attack from some position the political expression, Joe Boxer has remained remarkably noncontroversial.

Spokeswoman Slattery can single out as one of Joe Boxer's all-time hit products a pair of boxer shorts with a happy face across the fly and the label "Nose not included." She declines to explain the implication.

In the next breath, she insists that the company's product line - blessed over the years with many bananas, hot dogs and other equally subtle images - has absolutely no sexual connotations. Dittoheads and feminists must (1) agree, (2) not notice or (3) have better things to worry about.

60 models of watches &lt;

The new watch line will adapt some of the underwear motifs. With about 60 models priced at $40-$75, the watches will be part of Timex's battery-lit Indiglo line, which contributed up to half of the $500 million company's unit sales last year, Brandweek magazine estimated.

The partners are said to have high hopes for the Joe Boxer watches. In the mere decade since Swatch invented the kicky, low-priced category, fashion-watches have grown to $2 billion a year in the United States alone, grabbing 80 percent of the watch market, according to the Find / SVP market-research firm.

Graham's business sense keeps him from going off the deep end pursuing idiosyncratic whims, Slattery says.

But Graham does seem a tad obsessed with jet packs. He won't acknowledge that the personalized flying devices will never reach the awesome potential for Extreme Commuting envisioned on Popular Science covers of yore.

He's not positive he'll get off the ground for the watch event - seems there's some concerns about jet-packs' being incredibly dangerous. But someday, he promises.

He even dreams of opening a jet-pack theme park.

"The potential, I think, for jet packs is great," he says. "Can you imagine bike messengers in jet packs?" &lt;